Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People
H. Charles J. Godfray, 1 * John R. Beddington, 2 Ian R. Crute, 3 Lawrence Haddad, 4 David Lawrence, 5
James F. Muir, 6 Jules Pretty, 7 Sherman Robinson, 8 Sandy M. Thomas, 9 Camilla Toulmin 10公瑾是什么意思
Continuing population and consumption growth will mean that the global demand for food will
increa for at least another 40 years. Growing competition for land, water, and energy, in addition to the overexploitation of fisheries, will affect our ability to produce food, as will the urgent requirement to reduce the impact of the food system on the environment. The effects of climate change are a further threat. But the world can produce more food and can ensure that it is ud more efficiently and equitably. A multifaceted and linked global strategy is needed to ensure sustainable and equitable food curity, different components of which are explored here.
The past half-century has en marked growth in food production, allowing for a dramatic decrea in the proportion of the world’s people that are hungry, despite a doubling of the total population (Fig. 1) (1, 2). Nevertheless, more than one in ven people today still do not have access to sufficient protein and energy from their diet, and even more suffer from some form of micronutrient malnourishment (3). The world is now facing a new t of intercting challenges (4). The global population will continue to grow, yet it is likely to plateau at some 9 billion people by roughly the middle of this century. A major correlate of this deceleration in population growth is incread wealth, and with higher purchasing power comes higher consumption and a greater demand for procesd food, meat, dairy, and fish, all of which add pressure to the food supply system. At the same time, food producers are experiencing greater competition for land, water, and energy, and the need to curb the many negative effects of food production on the environment is becoming increasingly clear (5, 6). Overarching all of the issues is the threat of the effects of substantial climate change and concerns about how mitigation and adaptation measures may affect the food system (7, 8).
A threefold challenge now faces the world (9): Match the rapidly changing demand for food from a larger and more affluent population to its supply; do so in ways that are environmentally and socially sustainable; and ensure that the world’s poorest people are no longer hungry. This challenge requires changes in the way food is produced, stored, procesd, distributed, and accesd that are as radical as tho that occurred during the 18th- and 19th-century Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions and the 20th-century Green Revolution. Increas in production will have an important part to play, but they will be constrained as never before by the finite resources provided by Earth’s lands, oceans, and atmosphere (10).
Patterns in global food prices are indicators of trends in the availability of food, at least for tho who can afford it and have access to world markets. Over the past century, gross food prices have generally fallen, leveling off in the past three decades but punctuated by price spikes such as that caud by the 1970s oil crisis. In mid-2008, there was an unexpected rapid ri in food prices, the cau of which is still being debated, that subsided when the world economy went into recession (11). However, many (but not all)
沟通的艺术commentators have predicted that this spike heralds a period of rising and more volatile food prices driven primarily by incread demand from rapidly developing countries, as well as by competition for resources from first-generation biofuels production (12). Incread food prices will stimulate greater investment in food production, but the critical importance of food to human well-being and also to social and political stability makes it likely that governments and other organizations will want to encourage food production beyond that driven by simple market mechanisms (13). The long-term nature of returns on investment for many aspects of food production and the importance of policies that promote sustainability and equity also argue against purely relying on market solutions.
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So how can more food be produced sustainably? In the past, the primary solution to food shortages has been to bring more land into agriculture and to exploit new fish stocks. Yet over the past 5 decades, while grain production has more than doubled, the amount of land devoted to arable agriculture globally has incread by only ~9% (14). Some new land could be brought into cultivation, but the competition for land from other human activities makes this an increasingly unlikely and costly solution, particularly if protecting
biodiversity and the public goods provided by natural ecosystems (for example, carbon storage in rainforest) are given higher priority (15). In recent decades, agricultural land that was formerly productive has been lost to urbanization and other human us, as well as to dertification, salinization, soil erosion, and other conquences of unsustainable land management (16). Further loss, which may be exacerbated by climate change, are likely (7). Recent policy decisions to produce first generation biofuels on good quality agricultural land have added to the competitive pressures (17). Thus, the most likely scenario is that more food will need to be produced from the same amount of (or even less) land. Moreover, there are no major new fishing grounds: Virtually all capture fisheries are fully exploited, and most are overexploited.
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*The writers are members of the UK Government Office for Science's Foresight Project on Global Food and Farming Futures.
Source: Adapted from Godfray, H. C. J., Beddington, J. R., Crute, I. R., Haddad, L., Lawrence, D., Muir, J. F., et al. (2010). The challenge of feeding 9 billion people. Science. 327 (5987), 812-818.
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Fig. 1. Changes in the relative global production of crops and animals since 1961 (when relative production scaled to 1 in 1961). (A) Major crop plants and (B) major types of livestock. [Source: (2)]
毛德皇后地Main grains (wheat, barley,maize, rice, oats)
Coar grains (millet, sorghum)
Root crops (cassava, potato)
Chickens
慈祥的拼音济南会战Pigs
Cattle and buffalo
Sheep and goats
